For years, fans of tactical shooters have been crying out for someone to make a quality, hardcore, tactical shooter. But in contrast to these requests, game publishers eschew realism and tactics in exchange for ease of use and “cinematic” flavor. This campaign aims to see if my theory that real tactical shooters aren’t dead, and that enough people want one to justify the cost of development.

I’ve been in the video game industry working on best in class shooters for ten years now – designing and leading teams creating Tom Clancy games and Halo Reach. Now I’ve struck out and formed a new company for indie game development, Serellan LLC.

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I named someone further down in the comments that fits that bill. His title has floundered. You can argue it's all about this particular guy not being able to sell this kickstarter all you like, in the end it comes down tac shooters being dead.

The biggest issue with that guy is nobody knows his project exists. I'm not going to argue that the tactical shooter genre is thriving but as with any indie project, creating consumer awareness is essential. That's one of the reasons why Schafer's Kickstarter was so successful. All the major sites posted news about it. Conversely, I don't think I've read a single headline (aside from on this site) pertaining to this tac shooter Kickstarter or that project from the other guy.

Schafer's titles have broad appeal. You denied it earlier, but essentially that's why. I don't know why you're so focused on the individual.

Tactical shooters are a niche within a genre that's already completely flooded with titles. The average gamer cannot differentiate tactical shooters from CS, the hordes of F2P MP only shooters popping up or COD. No one individual is going to generate the sort of buzz that's required to fund a tac shooter through crowdsourcing. Monkey Island was like the Doom of Adventure games. Broad appeal. Day of the Tentacle is fondly remembered by a lot of people who played PC games as kids but likely only play games on their iphones now that they have their own kids.

I had some real idiot hipsters at my work post Schafer's kickstarter into their office skype taglines. There's something about adventure games that's wishy washy enough for anyone to jump onboard the bandwagon. Hardcore tactical shooters..good luck finding that broad appeal today. It pains me to say that because it's far and away my favourite PC gaming genre.